Nantucket's On Island Chefs — Local services in Nantucket

These guys promise a great gourmet menu and show up with half of the courses they had promised. They bait and switch you with super low quality ingredients/food not even close to what was ordered or promised. Some courses were just missed altogether without apology.

To make the experience worse, the owner / chef didn’t even show up to cook anything, and took almost no responsibility for a very poor product. We are very reasonable people, who would not have left a bad review but we gave ample opportunity to fix the issues, and this guy took little to no ownership of his product & was rude plus gaslighted our host. Replacing expensive wooden handled steak knives your team ruined in the dish washer with knock off cheap amazon brand is not really “fixing the issue”.

The “food”:

The crab cakes tasted like frozen reheated cornmeal, the salad was so badly wilted, it was inedible, the “beef tenderloin” was reheated roast beef and not seasoned at all. They missed several courses completely without apology. If you advertise “lobster Mac and cheese” you can NOT show up with cheap box brand mac and cheese casserole with a speck of lobster per serving…. and then dry it out completely in the “cooking” process… if you want to call it that. Pretty much everything was pre-cooked and reheated. Nothing was really “cooked” on property.

Your communication with our host on her birthday is embarrassingly unprofessional & only something crooked business owners do!

You’d be better off buying a pre made sandwich or pre made casserole from any of the island providers and saving your money & energy dealing with...

BEWARE, this was a truly appalling experience. First off, we were given a menu, which the host distributed in advance to all guests, and then the menu was not adhered to. Not only was the menu not adhered to, but courses were missing. Also, if you have dogs, they’ll claim your animals are attacking them. (The host had a friendly tiny 25 lb duck tolling retriever). We were served lobster rolls which were decent, frozen / gross crab cakes from a frozen box, and a terrible salad with wilting fruit. It tasted old and pre-packaged from a takeaway at stop and shop or somewhere, but then left in the fridge for a week before serving. There was supposed to be burrata (missing). There were supposed to be sliders (missing). There was supposed to be aioli with the crab cakes (missing). There was supposed to be an onion jam (missing). We each were served re-heated beef tenderloin, 3 asparagus spears, and a dry congealed square of box macaroni and cheese with lobster added. You could actually tell it was boxed mac n cheese from the distinctive noodle shape. Dessert was a cheap grocery store cheesecake. To end it all, they ruined the hosts steak knives by putting the beautiful BRAND NEW French wood handled knives in the dishwasher. What chef puts wood in the dishwasher??! I was told by the host the chef went on online and bought her $15.99 knock off knives after the fact to replace them. What a disgrace of a business. They also were awful to deal with after we gave them several chances to...

I was a recent guest at an event where this company provided an in-home dining experience. Having worked in the food and wine industry in Manhattan for several years, I have been exposed to many private chefs and catering entities. In this context, I can say that Nantucket’s On Island Chefs was the single worst meal of this type that I have ever experienced. Rather than being a true in-home, freshly prepared dining experience, this was simply a reheating of multiple subpar courses. A host could recreate such an experience at a higher quality and lower cost by simply buying casserole pans of prepared foods from a quality producer and putting it in the oven themself. We did so ourselves a few nights later by purchasing a variety of prepared foods from Bartlett’s Farm and had a decidedly superior experience. For the cost, this is a shockingly low-quality service offering and I would highly recommend...